1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server system, a print device, a network print system including the server system and the print device, and a downloading method in the network print system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, establishment of infrastructures called cloud services, in which services are provided by a server system connected to the Internet, has been in progress. Print services for pull printing over the Internet have also been provided: the services offer functions of generating and distributing print data with a server on the Internet at the request of a print device (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-196757, for example). Now, systems that provide such print services by using the aforementioned Cloud are being developed. Such systems generally use formats widely in use for digital documents to be printed. Among others, data in PDF (Portable Document Format) of Adobe Systems Incorporated is often used.
In the PDF format, however, a structure description necessary for interpreting the structure of data of a digital document to be printed is written at the end of the digital document. To interpret a PDF file, the entire PDF file has to be downloaded to refer to the structure description at the end of the file. Accordingly, downloading and printing cannot be processed in parallel. Since printing cannot be started until downloading is finished, it may take much time to complete printing.
The downloading and printing of a file can be currently performed in parallel if, for example, a file in a format with a structure description written at the beginning of the file is used for a print service. Even in this case, printing of divided PDF file portions received by a print device is delayed if immediate printing is prevented by temperature adjustment, calibration, or paper jam in the engine of the print device. This may cause a decrease in the overall efficiency, resulting in a long print time.
In addition, in the above case, if too high a priority is placed on a reception process for the print device to receive data from a cloud server, the print process may be delayed because the reception is performed preferentially over the print process.